One world, one Maker

Next Celsus says that "the goatherds and shepherds who followed Moses as their leader were beguiled by rustic deceits and came to think there is one God." Since, as he thinks, goatherds and shepherds turned away from the worship of gods without reason, let him show, then, how he himself can establish the multitude of gods held by the Greeks, or by the other barbarian peoples. Let him show the real existence and substance of Mnemosyne bearing the Muses by Zeus, or of Themis bearing the Hours; or let him prove that the Graces, who are always naked, can truly exist in substance. But he will not be able to show from the facts that the inventions of the Greeks, which seem to be given bodily form, are gods. Why are the Greeks' myths about gods any truer than, say, those of the Egyptians? In their own language the Egyptians know nothing of Mnemosyne as mother of the nine Muses, nor of Themis as mother of the Hours, nor of Eurynome as one of the Graces, nor any of their other names.

How much more effective, then, and how much better than all these inventions it is to be persuaded by what we see, by the good order of the world, to worship its Maker as one, since the world is one and wholly in harmony with itself! For that reason it cannot have been made by many makers, just as it cannot be held together by many souls moving the whole heaven. For one soul is enough, which carries the whole sphere of the fixed stars from east to west and embraces within it all the things the world needs, things that are not complete in themselves. For all these are parts of the world, but God is no part of a whole, since God cannot be incomplete, as a part is incomplete. Yet perhaps a deeper account will show that God, in the proper sense, is not a whole either, just as he is not a part, since a whole is made up of parts. And reason does not allow us to accept that the God over all is made up of parts, each of which cannot do what the other parts do.